We know you have many products in your analytics tool box. And we know that you’re looking for data you can trust when it comes to editorial decisions. As a Chartcorps member who educates and works with clients every day, I am often asked how Chartbeat differs from other analytics and why our data doesn’t match the numbers you might be seeing from another analytics service. Here’s a brief overview and I’ve throw in a nifty cheat sheet too.

First things first: Let’s talk about roots.

Similar to the blazers+jeans career look, Chartbeat Publishing was born and bred in the newsroom. (Tweet this) While several peers offer great options to cover a wide range of clients, these tools are often developed to be one-size-fits-all analytics solutions. In our case, we’ve collaborated with our editorial partners to offer products and features designed to surface data specific to the online publishing workflow.

Beyond-the-basics data

Like any service, Chartbeat does give you standard, bread-and-butter insights on traffic sources and top pages. But it’s our additional data, researched and curated by our data science team, that’s specifically relevant to digital publishers. We integrate this data into many products and features so that you have what you need at your fingertips 24/7, such as social data on trending content or customized data science power tools like Spike Alerts that identify your potential viral content.

We’re always iterating on tools that integrate into the various roles within your team, like the Chartbeat app, the Heads Up Display and all the useful stuff you can access on the Chartbeat Labs site. However you work and no matter what your responsibilities are, there’s data-driven feature or tool that can help you out.

Real-time measuring that matters

We’ve always shirked popular conventions around click or view-based metrics. Instead, we focus on measuring the data that truly gives you a sense of your live, real-time audience. Chartbeat, like an obsessive host, is constantly checking in – pinging your site every fifteen seconds to be exact – taking attendance and tracking how long, on average, your users tend to stick around. This means our metrics typically aren’t going to match what your other analytics are saying. To see specifically how our numbers vary from Google Analytics figures, go to this infographic.

Measuring your audience’s interest, not their clicks

From what we understand, working in online publishing is sort of like running as fast as you can whilst juggling, i.e., tons to do in a very short time frame. Thus you need the most accurate stats on real-time traffic moment to moment, quantitatively and qualitatively. It’s not enough to show you how many folks are visiting a page – those stats need life and context. (Tweet this) Enter, Engaged Time. We measure engaged visitor activity by tracking scrolling, mouse movements or keystrokes – so you know how many people are actively consuming your content and for how long.

Because a reader’s Engaged Time correlates with his or her likelihood to return to your site, you need engagement insights no matter what you’re working on. Thus, we’ve integrated our signature metric Engaged Time into many of our features and products.

Get the whole story

Overall, we see value in using Chartbeat as a complementary product with other analytics services. You should always to take a 360-degree view of your site. A bunch of publishers – big and small – find our metrics and tools pretty damn useful for informing a significant part of that 360-degree view when it comes to taking action and making decisions.